one day is like the pearl ...

one day is like the pearl

˜One day is like the pearl, the others are like the oyster, said Captain Onedin in one of his rare soft moments in the TV series, standing on the deck at dawn with his wife. There is much truth in this sentence !

Daily routines are much the same to most people. Routines and habits, at work as well as at home, make most days ˜oysters . If everything is the same way today as it was yesterday , there is nothing special to remember.

As you might have noticed in the memory test on page 67 it is easier to remember words that differ in some way (Queen Elizabeth , for instance) or if they are repeated.

The others tend to become blurred. That is also why many people can t remember what they had for lunch last week “ unless something unusual was attached to it.

If we don t spice our lives with ˜pearls , life will be a series of blurred events with a few clear highlights long ago and you end up wondering what happened in your life. A lot of people today don t live a life of their own. They let others live it in the magazines they read and in the TV programmes they watch. It is not much use going out, because they can t see such beautiful things as they show on telly anyway!

If that is the way you live, more or less, you need strong sensations to make an impact on you. Perhaps that is an explanation of why violence and realism have become more naked on news programmes and in newspapers today. Often the effect will be the opposite : we get used to stronger and stronger sensations and we need more and more to make us react . Too much information will also lead to a deteriorating memory. There is a threshold for under-stimulation as well as over-stimulation.